I swallowed ash. Ash that tasted as bitter and toxic as the truth. “No, Heath. This is me moving on. This is me marrying someone I love. This is healthy. This is right.”
The words hurt me coming out. They scratched my throat with their sharp edges. Because they were true.
I did love Craig. In a simple and easy way that didn’t make me feel like I was now. Like I always did with Heath. Like I was minutes from destruction.
“If it’s right, if it’s healthy, then, baby, that’s not love,” Heath argued. “That’s a fucking fabrication. And you know it.”
My palms began to sweat. I kept my hand tight on my stomach. On the flat and suddenly suffocating fabric.
“You come with me right now, it’s not gonna be easy, or healthy, or right. But it’s what you need. It’s what you deserve,” Heath continued, his voice now a low rasp. He stepped forward and his hands framed my face. “You know that I’m right. I know you want to come. I can see it in your eyes.” He paused, letting the words sink into my bones, whittle away at my soul. “I can live without you, Sunshine,” he murmured, uttering the opposite of what all the heroes said in the movies, the books. “But I don’t want to.”
I let the moment caress me for less than a second. I entertained the idea of doing exactly what he said. Half of the guests wouldn’t be surprised. The rest would almost expect it. Polly leaving a guy at the altar was almost as predictable as Polly marrying a guy she’d known less than two months—I’d known him for three weeks before getting engaged.
But then it stopped me.
Love.
Love that was simple and healthy and right, love that was an anchor keeping me here and a barrier to whatever it was I had with Heath.
“You need to leave,” I choked out, hating that my voice didn’t sound stronger.
Because as it fell apart, it gave Heath threads to grasp onto. Yank at with his gaze. With the tightening of his hands at my neck. “You better rethink that choice, Polly,” he growled. “’Cause this is it. The moment in life you’ve got a chance to go beyond the ordinary. Beyond even the extraordinary.”
He mocked me with words from the past.
And they hit their mark.
Too bad they didn’t change anything.
He froze, his eyes the only thing moving, they were roving over every inch of me, like he was committing me to memory, like he was taking me in right before he walked out of my life forever.
Which was good.
That needed to happen.
“You’re makin’ a mistake, Sunshine,” he murmured. “And I’m not gonna save you from it. Not gonna fight you when you chose to belong to another man. Even though we both know the parts you don’t want anyone to see belong to fucking me.”
He didn’t give me the chance to speak, because his mouth crashed down on mine.
He was kissing me.
While I was in my wedding dress.
Minutes away from marrying another man.
A man I loved.
Who was kind.
Simple.
Beautiful.
And none of that mattered.
Because the kiss wasn’t kind.
Or simple.
Or beautiful.
How could a kiss like this be beautiful? It was impossible. Because it was full of truth. Full of goodbye.
I shouldn’t have kissed him back. Shouldn’t have met his ferocity with some of my own, the kind that had lain dormant for years.
No, I shouldn’t have done that.
But I was me, and I spent my life doing things I shouldn’t do.
So I kissed him back.
Betrayed Craig.
Myself.
And then it was over.
I was no longer in his arms, he had retreated fast across the room, rubbing the back of his hand along his mouth, as if he were rubbing away my kiss. Rubbing away all evidence of me.
There was no tenderness in his eyes.
No kindness.
He wasn’t going to wish me well or tell me to be happy.
But he was going to say something. He had to say something. In moments like these, the man always said something. One last plea. One last hurl of ugly beautiful promises.
And I would’ve relented.
Despite everything that I knew would end us, that I knew would make me hate myself in the future, if he’d opened his mouth and said one more thing, outstretched his hand, I would’ve taken it.
But he didn’t.
He glared at me with a mixture of love and hatred, the latter being the prevailing emotion, and then he turned and walked out.
Without a word.
Because this wasn’t a movie or a fairy tale.
Woodenly, I turned back to the mirror. My eyes were no longer darkened underneath, my face flush in all the right places and my lips pink and swollen.
My hair was mussed, but artfully so the flowers I’d woven into them didn’t look as purposeful as before.
I smoothed my dress again, my hand flat on my stomach to calm the sickness swirling at the base of it.
A single tear trailed down my cheek.
I wiped it away with the back of my hand.
And then I turned to go and marry another man.
I promised myself I’d forget that moment. I’d love Craig with my whole heart. Whatever was left. And this moment with Heath would be buried among the many in the graveyard of our past together.
But promises were broken much easier than they were made.
Especially the ones I made to myself.
Especially when they had anything to do with Heath.
Chapter One
Six Years Earlier
“I think I might go!” I yelled at Harry over the music.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like music so loud that you couldn’t talk unless you screamed in your date’s ears. Or crowded bars with sticky floors and water stained glasses. Or the patrons of that bar veering toward the unseemly at best and criminals at worst.
No, all of that was completely fine with me. I wasn’t one to shy away from such things, and these were the only type of bars that didn’t card.
But the music was bad.
The company was only slightly better.
Harry had seemed cool and hip when surrounded by the overwhelmingly normal crowd of our high school. He wore scuffed Doc Martins. Band tee shirts that pretty much no one had ever heard of. His hair was always artfully messed so it draped over his features effortlessly and beautifully. He carried around books of poetry and then also played music so loud from his iPod that you could hear it down the halls.
He seemed such a contrast, complex and soulful. I’d obviously fell in total lust with him and damn near melted when he asked me to come to a ‘gig’ in L.A. with him and his ‘crew.’
My parents knew exactly where I was because I was legally an adult, they couldn’t stop me. Lucy had told me to call her if I needed bail money and hooked pepper spray onto my keychain.
It had been fun at first. His friends were all pseudo arty hipsters who took themselves a little seriously but were still fun to be around. But then he started slamming too many tequila shots and got sloppy and handsy and betrayed his true persona as a sleazy teenage boy after one thing.
So I was leaving.
I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to leave, since everyone we’d drove here with had dispersed in the bar and even if I found someone who had the keys to the van parked somewhere down the street, no one could drive.